THE MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF COMPROMISE

The supreme postulate of Liberalism, social engineering, social
activism, social advocacy, rights movements, peace movements, the
United Nations... is that compromise is possible. By crippling
the able and enabling the crippled we can all get along. It is
rigorously mathematically demonstrated that no compromises exist
for complex multi-variable problems, even in theory. Zealot
religions of tiny-minded fanatics know what they are doing.
Diversity (a word grievously devalued in the manner of "gay") is
mathematically guaranteed, irrevocable, inevitable disaster.

Create a multidimensional compromise space. Choose a variable,
normalize it on a scale of 1 through zero to -1 inclusive. Love
thy neighbor, kill thy neighbor. Racial integration, racial
segregation. Keep all that you earn, the State confiscates all
that you earn. Every school kid gets automatic straight As in
everything, Darwinian social evolution. United Nations, mean
Mother Green. Sister Boom-Boom, Vlad the Impaler.

Each normalized line is assigned its own dimension and is
appended orthogonal to all prior lines. The zero centers of all
lines coincide as a common origin. N variables then create a
filled N-dimensional unit hypersphere, a closed N-hyperball, with
each line being one of its diameters (each variable being wholly
independent of all the others). The closed N-hyperball embraces
every possible combination and magnitude of overall policy as the
totality of single points on its surface and in its volume.
Points near the center are maximally effete compromise. Points
near the surface are the most draconian events possible.

A hypercube with edge length 2 and volume 2N circumscribes
about any unit N-hypersphere. The ratio of our N-hyperball's volume to
its circumscribed hypercube monotonically decreases as the
dimension N, the number of independent variables, increases. As
a problem's complexity increases the closed N-hyperball of all
possible solutions - of any kind - monotonically shrinks toward a
zero volume point. The results are inescapable:

As N, the number of variables, increases the number of
compromise choices of all kinds shrinks toward zero. A large
multi-variable problem has asymptotically no solutions at all
much less a menu of nice compromise solutions.

By N=10, 89.3% of the volume is within 20% radius of the
surface. Almost every choice is a draconian imposition.

By N=20, 98.8% of the volume is within 20% radius of the
surface, and the overall volume - the summation of choices
available - is essentially zero. There is no compromise
possible. The few choices remaining are fanatic.

A society exercising local decisions given limited choices can
find optimum solutions. A society with central administration
juggling hundreds of variables for each decision (social policy,
economics, Congresscritters' appetites) will be a shambles at
every scale of implementation. The USSR was doomed from the
start; Washington ever more passionately seeks a death spiral.

The Department of Education and the Department of Health and
Human Services are mathematically constrained to fail.
Abominable Neanderthal Drill Instructors on Parris Island will
succeed. A kinder, gentler armed forces with girls and benign,
fairly administered procedures is a hopeless farce.

Fair business practices obeying multiple layers of reportage,
regulation, affirmative social policies, and union negotiation
wither and die. Monomaniacal robber barons succeed. Mighty,
huge, and politically complex Imperial Rome fell to small bands
of simpleton barbarians, each a one-man show. The Balkans are a
disorganized bloodbath stable for 1000 years against every
invader; the US is shaken to its core by the loss of two
buildings (and still upchucking tens of $billions/year for
"homeland security" seven years later).

The solution to complex multi-variable social, economic, and
political problems is not compromise. It cannot be compromise.
It can never be compromise even in principle. Any attempt at
compromise is a long voyage into wrong answers where traveling
more is drowning deeper. Accomplishment is the exclusive
providence of narrowly focussed individuals.

1900s education worked because it was simple and direct. Every
wretched immigrant kid learned English reading, English writing,
and arithmetic without choice in buildings that were hardly more
than shacks. Education in the 21st century is a dysfunctional
bleeding ulcer not because we are not doing enough, spending
enough, or lack compassion. Public education is a bleeding ulcer
specifically because we are pursuing all those things with
maximum vigor and budget in carpeted air-conditioned audio-visual
multi-cultural pleasure domes for our delicate Adderall-gulping
children. If public education is about anything but the
narrowest least complex vision of education, it will fail.

The Constitution grants broad undifferentiated swaths of
individual rights, limitations upon State incursion, and then
shuts up. Massive waves of immigration arrived on American
shores and became part of the American dream one generation
later. Actively interventionist centrally administered social
policy since President Johnson's Great Society sought to please
everybody. It created a nation of two working parents, shattered
families, intractable slums, hyphenated Americans, and multi-
lingual ballots. Lose the hyphens and locally target simple
goals, or the closed N-hyperball will swallow you and shrink to a
point. CRUNCH. Mathematics is implacable.

As for Liberalism, social engineering, social activism, social
advocacy, rights movements, peace movements, the United
Nations... their failure is a necessity not an annoyance. "It
doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter
how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's
wrong." Richard Feynman.